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Comment by thewebguyd

4 days ago

> Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years.

Same thing happens with UI & Website design. When the designers and front-end devs all have top-spec MacBooks, with 4k+ displays, they design to look good in that environment.

Then you ship to the rest of the world which are still for the most part on 16:9 1920x1080 (or god forbid, 1366x768), low spec windows laptops and the UI looks like shit and is borderline unstable.

Now I don't necessarily think things should be designed for the lowest common denominator, but at the very least we should be taking into consideration that the majority of users probably don't have super high end machines or displays. Even today you can buy a brand new "budget" windows laptop that'll come with 8GB of RAM, and a tiny 1920x1080 display, with poor color reproduction and crazy low brightness - and that's what the majority of people are using, if they are using a computer at all and not a phone or tablet.